In HeroQuest, a hero can do one action per turn (move then action or action then move). The choices for an action are – attack, spell, search for traps, search for secret doors, search for treasure, and disarm trap. Three of the six actions are “search”. If you’re in a room, search checks the current room. If you’re in a corridor, search checks corridor line of sight. This is similar to visibility in terms of ranged attacks and spells with the anti-door camping rule ( link). One key difference is that you can’t search when a monster is visible.

Search treasure only applies to rooms (there’s no treasure in corridors), and each hero can only search a room for treasure one time. So one quirk of HeroQuest is that the players have to keep track of which heroes searched which rooms. It also makes sense to remember which areas you searched for traps and secret doors – because otherwise you may end up forgetting to search an area or you may end up searching the same area repeatedly.

For the video game version of HeroQuest, it’s useful to allow the player to see where they’ve searched.

Results

I decided to convey this information using a dynamic texture, so the implementation is similar to what I did for fog of war (see my previous post).

For my board material’s pixels, we start from the board texture, multiply by fog of war, then add search highlighting.

I added a UMG combobox in the bottom-right corner of the screen. This let’s you select which search type you want highlighted on the board – none, trap, door, or treasure.

In the screen shots below, you can see the first room’s squares highlight in cyan when “door” is selected. You can also see the secret doors revealed (I added lots of secret doors for testing).

I tested it on Windows desktop and on an Android tablet (Fire HD 6) with a relatively small screen. The UMG combobox is a reasonable size even on tiny Android tablet.